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Services Marketing
Notes example of the mutual fund payers quoted above, whether the schemes are growth oriented,
dividend paying or both might enlarge the scope of choice being offered to the customers.
In retailing, the same apparel brand can be offered in different sizes and colours; ice cream
parlours offer the same ice cream in different flavours, colours etc. Service firms like tour
package operators, beauty parlours, restaurants, clubs, offer different grades of services at different
prices, with different add-on features.
Example: Kuoni Travel through its brand SOTC is offering rigidly designed tour packages
for its customers but also is offering from this summer the highly flexible Christopher Columbus
Holidays for the freewheeling traveller.
Self Assessment
Fill in the blanks:
1. In services, the consumer gets to
the offer but never gets to own it.
2. Meals or food is the
product of a restaurant.
3. Guarantees are a part of an offers
product.
4. The complete bouquet of all offers of a firm is called
5. The
of the service product mix of the firm gives another perspective to the
number of items in a product line.
9.2 Product Life Cycle
A service offer goes through stages of slow acceptance, surge in popularity, steady sales and
sometimes drop in sales. The drop in sales can be due to many factors including better substitute
offers, product obsolescence, changing preferences of the consumers, etc.
Example: In Mumbai, and other metros, in the late nineties, there arose a craze amongst
the youth for pool parlours, that started sprouting in every nook and corner of the cities; for
entrepreneurs, it seemed to be a jolly good idea: minimal capital and interiors, small space, with
the only fixed capital requirement being the pool table, cue sticks, balls, air conditioning
(sometimes even that was dispensed with), bare furniture, etc., taking on the form of a fad. But
its flameout was just as fast as its rise.
It became imperative for the service marketer to study these varying patterns of sales growth
over the lifetime of the offer. A useful model for such study that evolved to satisfy an analysts
need was the concept of the service Product Life Cycle (PLC). With the simple comparison to the
stages of human life, PLC implies that services also move through easily identifiable
compartments of time and have different characteristics. It greatly helped the service marketer
to plan for the appropriate marketing initiatives and responses during specific stages of a
service offers life span.
The PLC has been co-opted as a basic assumption factor in the Boston Consulting Group Grid
and in many theories of new product development. Researchers have come to the conclusion
that the product life cycle model is very valid in many common market scenarios.
What are the characteristics of a typical offer/service product life cycle? It is the different stages
that the product goes through during its cycle of birth, youth, maturity, decline and death/
rebirth. The marketer can attempt at a revival and therefore its called a life cycle.
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